So where did your forum handle come from?

Simple really - Lord Mayhem is the first villain I made on the day of CoV's launch and my first ever level 50 character here (on either side). I had wanted to play a demon character in an MMO for years and this was the first MMO that let me, and the name seemed to fit.

Admittedly I did change my forum handle when the EU & US forums merged, so that it would match my in-game global handle - which I had also changed at some point because most of my in-game friends were calling me Mayhem (as he was the first character of mine they ever grouped with) regardless of my previous global name or which character I was playing, so I just caved in to public opinion. My forum handle on the EU forums (and iirc my old global name) was Valkryst, the name of the first CoH character I ever created in I5 (Count Valkryst - BS/Reg scrapper), which I've used as a character name in dozens of other online games previously.

Whatside? Planetside!

... I picked it almost completely at random, because Planetside was my first MMO-type game and one of my friends told me to 'just pick a name at random'.

I found my name in a crackerjack box.






...Ok, I lied. Ashcraft was the main character in the first novel project of mine that made it beyond 100 pages. He was a fair-skinned elf whose skin had been stained grey with ash from years working as a blacksmith. Seemed as good a name as anything when I signed up for this game back in 2004.

When I first joined the forums, in June of 2004, I was PDXTeach. Then I created my favorite character after CoV was released...Portland Underground. He was named for the famed, supposedly-haunted tunnels which lie beneath the city I live in and love. So, I reregisted under that name...lost my original forum birthday...but I like the handle much more.

I chose the name BBQ_Pork because my original forum name was a profanity in Afrikaans.
It's the name of a retired character I have on Virtue. Baxter, the Mutant Pig, showed up in Paragon City to fight crime. Not really understanding the concept of a secret identity or that heroes had seperate Hero Names and Real Names, the bored DMV-worker-like woman at City Hall wrote in "BBQ Pork" on the Hero Registration Card for this little mutant Fire/Fire Tank.
So, back when the forums allowed me to have an avatar, the avatar was a pig, not a sammich.

Umm... the forums will STILL let you have an avatar...

Ah, the heady days of arguing moot points and crying d00m...

My original handle was Radiant Beam (my first 50), via Protector. When Protector began to... well, sufficed to say it had its share of pettiness, I moved to Virtue.

I got involved with the community there and eventually I heard "It's Rad's fault" or "Rad did it" so many times it became my true name.

My globals are now RadDidIt, RadDidItAgain, and RadDidItSomeMore :P

Mine is simply my first true main character that I leveled up. Rolled him up about within a week or two of starting the game. I remember getting schooled in Kings Row and Steel when Issue 2: Attack of the Roaming Eyeballs started.

Mine is simply the name of my Star Wars Galaxies character. Had the most fun on that character of any I've made in any game. Of course, having met my wife (IRL) while playing him might have had something to do with that..

Named after my global handle/my first 50.

My forum name is the same as my main on Justice.

Animal: Old Army nickname that I've been stuck with since 1985 or so. Even Mrs. Animal calls me Animal.

PSL: See the signature.

My forum handle has usually been representative of my "main" character. Back in the early days (pre-CoV), my handle was Axegrinder. Once CoV came around, I became Smashmouth and was known as that until right before the forum migration. I then changed my handle to Goliath Bird Eater, so named because of my awesome level 50 Crab Spider who is now, and always will be, my favorite character.

DreamWeaver was/is my very first toon (and first 50). Not a bad name for a perkygoth emp/psi healZ0r, really, who was a web designer and TV researcher before getting into srs superheroine bizness.

Desi Nova was actually the second character I created, also the first I created on Justice. the first I ever created was called desdinova, from a reference in a blue oyster cult song. when I came to Justice, that name wasn't available. and not knowing about punctuation affecting names, I came up with desi nova, she is also my first 50

I've always been someone to just be there in the background, never really being noticed. So a group of friends close to 20 years ago called me a not-so-innocent bystander. It didn't really stick as much for me as other names I had did, but just a bit over three years ago I needed to create an identity for work, and so I started using the name Bystander again.

Didn't we already have a recent thread that covered this subject?

Anyway, "synthozoic" has nothing to do with my first CoH character or my global handle in the game. Nor does it have anything to do any previous game handles I may have had in the past. It's just that I've used those others as handles on websites elsewhere and I didn't want to confuse search engines with "that guy I was back there" versus "the other guy I am over there" versus "the guy I am here."

Synthozoic was a Greek-inspired, mock-technical term I invented in an old blog post on my own website. In it I recalled the era divisions of geology--proterozoic, cenozoic, mesozoic, paleozoic, phanerozoic and so on. I intended it refer to a geologic period in Earth's history where artificial life began to predominate.

The word didn't seem to exist anywhere else on the Web so I decided to use it here. If you enter it now into a search engine, all the hits will point back here. That's really all there is to it.

I live in a city called Brampton. My friend used to say "What's up in the Bramphouse?" I figured that being an inhabitant, I would be a Bramphousian.

I use it on a number of sites. Though, looking at Google, there are a few entries which aren't me, and leave me puzzled.

Thank you, Champion.

Behindthename.com Was searching for a name for my Dark/Dark defender, and one of the names came up with being from the words "Rajani" and "Isha".

Hope no one trips over that H. Have no clue where I left it X.X